Serial AT Attachment (SATA) is a computer bus interface for connecting host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives and optical drives. Currently if a SATA host needs to access multiple SATA drives, it is done through a port multiplier which has a limitation of sixteen physical SATA drives and this is the maximum number of physical SATA drives which can be accessed by a legacy port multiplier aware SATA host. On the other hand, addressing schemes such as 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA) with 512 byte sector size is 144 PiB (pebibyte). Since the maximum available size for a physical SATA drive is far less in capacity than 144 PiB, a large number of physical SATA drives may need to be group together. However, there is no efficient mechanism available to group the multiple physical SATA drives into one logical SATA drive which can be seen by the SATA host through a port multiplier.
Therein lies the need to provide a method and system to enable access of large number of SATA drives in a SAS topology to SATA hosts/initiators without the aforementioned shortcomings.